Reel Deal: My favorite female performances this year

Monday

Dec 20, 2010 at 12:01 AMDec 20, 2010 at 8:18 PM

Reel Deal’s wrapping up the year in flicks, sorting through a towering stack of movie ticket stubs to single out the best and brightest. This week is all about the ladies. Here’s a rundown of my favorite female performances of the past year, along with reviews of a few late contenders.

Robert McCune

Reel Deal’s wrapping up the year in flicks, sorting through a towering stack of movie ticket stubs to single out the best and brightest.

This week is all about the ladies. Here’s a rundown of my favorite female performances of the past year, along with reviews of a few late contenders.

The Academy Awards’ little golden guy, Oscar, isn’t likely to agree with many of my choices. I didn’t say they were the best ... just my favorites.

• Angelina Jolie: “Salt” ... not “The Tourist.”

With those piercing eyes and pouty lips, Jolie broke more bones than hearts as a CIA agent on the run after she’s accused of being a Russian spy in “Salt.” The action thriller from director Phillip Noyce was spiced just right, packing plenty of punch with an exhilarating race from start all the way to the end credits.

Jolie goes from blond to jet-black –– in personality as much as in hair color –– and is red hot in this wild ride that keeps you guessing. It’s also a fierce reminder that Jolie is a fine actress, and much more than Brad Pitt’s arm candy on the cover of most supermarket rags.

That makes her tepid turn in “The Tourist” all the more disappointing. Johnny Depp co-stars in the “thriller” that works perhaps better as a travelogue. It saunters through the sensational scenery of Venice, Italy, capturing one postcard-worthy image after another, leaving the audience feeling like the tourist of the title.

Unfortunately, though, the performances are just as flat as the postcards they’re printed on. And this film, while pretty, is also predictable and tiresome –– wearing (like most vacations tend to do, no matter how spectacular the setting) ever thinner as time goes by.

Jolie plays the mysterious Elise Ward like a porcelain doll: mostly still and expressionless as she orchestrates a diversion for her lover, on the lamb after stealing an outrageous amount of money from an English mobster.

The diversion involves American tourist and math teacher Frank Tupelo (Depp), who she randomly selects from a crowd of passengers on a designated train to throw cops and crooks off the trail of the thief.

This, of course, complicates the teacher/tourist’s vacation, as he’s seduced by the sexy stranger and set up like a target at a shooting range.

Meanwhile, the man everybody’s after (the unseen, thieving Alexander Pearce) is passing notes like a smitten junior-high girl, leading his suitors on one wild goose chase after another.

Though Depp injects the only bit of personality there is in “The Tourist,” he isn’t his usual charismatic self. He tones it down for Tupelo, whose panic and fear of being maimed by mobsters even barely registers a ripple.

I’ll refrain from spoiling it for you here, but the ending I saw coming ... like the last image in a pack of vacation photos, processed and sorted while you wait at a Walgreens or the like.

This little film about a couple of teenagers with two moms connecting with their shared sperm-donor-dad flew mostly under the radar at the box office. But it’s unique and funny and worth giving a shot on DVD.

Mark Ruffalo (as “donor dad” Paul) is joyously along for the ride, and Josh Hutcherson adds plenty of palpable teen angst as Laser, one of the fruits of his loins, but the women rule this roost.

Wasikowska is Joni (named for singer Joni Mitchell), Laser’s sister. They have different mothers, but the same biological father (Paul), who in early adulthood thought selling sperm would be “more fun than selling blood.”

The two moms, Jules (Moore) and Nic (Bening), chose to use a common ingredient when starting their unconventional family.

Nic’s the breadwinner (a successful doctor), Jules is a dreamer (currently aspiring to be a master gardener/landscape artist) and both are good moms.

But Laser (in high school) and Joni (off to college soon) wonder about the daddy they didn’t have, which leads them to investigate and then reach out to Paul, who ends up being a bit giddy over the idea of being a father to the grown children of two lesbians.

Paul, a restaurateur who stocks his own pantry out of his garden and rides a motorcycle, is fun, cool and liked by all – except Nic, who feels threatened by his sudden interest in their family.

Things get more complicated when Paul hires Jules to landscape his yard, and the two develop more than a friendship.

Bening and Moore are outstanding as a couple forced to see the cracks and flaws in their relationship by a sudden interloper as she tries to hold their family together.

Wasikowska is on a roll, starring alongside Hal Holbrooke in the small but exceptional “That Evening Sun” in 2009 and as the title character in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” with “Mad Hatter” Johnny Depp earlier this year.

The kid is more than all right.

• Anne Hathaway: “Love and Other Drugs.” As I made clear in last week’s column, I’m in the Anne Hathaway fan club, especially after watching her sexy and sympathetic portrayal of a woman stricken by Parkinson’s disease way too early in life. The film focuses more on her co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal, but Hathaway’s clearly the better half.

• Chloe Moretz: “Let Me In,” “Kick-Ass” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” The 13-year-old actress may look small and sweet, but she’s dangerous. You wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley as Abby, the forever-young vampire in “Let Me In,” a remake of Sweden’s subtitled “Let the Right One In.” And as Hit Girl, the foul-mouthed super-sidekick in “Kick-Ass,” she not only stole the show, she tore it up. In the Nickelodeon-produced movie adaptation of the popular children’s book series “Diary of A Wimpy Kid,” she’s kinder and wiser but no less formidable as Angie Steadman, who works on the junior high newspaper and tries to advise the younger, misguided, popularity-obsessed “wimpy kid” of the title, Greg Heffley (played by Zachary Gordon). I think we’re going to be seeing much more of Moretz in bigger, meaner roles to come.

• Helen Mirren: “Red.” Sixty-five has never looked sexier than when Mirren’s former network specialist turns in her Martha-Stewart-like retirement for a machinegun and another mission with fellow fogie agents Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), Marvin (John Malkovich) and Joe (Morgan Freeman) in the comic book adaptation “Red,” an acronym for “retired, extremely dangerous.” Mirren’s a silver fox, a stone-cold killer and a kind of odd “Dear Abby” for Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a regular girl whose spy fantasies come true when she connects with Frank on a customer service call about his Social Security.

• Mandy Moore: “Tangled.” The singer’s sweet voice lends life and laughter as the long-locked princess in Disney’s new take on the Rapunzel fairytale. She not only reads the lines for her animated maiden, she belts out the Broadway-ready tunes in this new classic that stacks up with the best, from “Snow White” and “Cinderella” to “Beauty and the Beast.”

Robert McCune is editor of The Independent in Ohio. His Reel Deal reviews appear in The Independent each Saturday and at IndeOnline.com.